The Sikhs For Justice, a purely peaceful organization that’s campaigning for a plebiscite on the independence of Indian Punjab as Khalistan, are taking their support for Kashmir to the next level by filing a complaint at the UN about India’s recent “Israeli”-like unilateral actions in the occupied territory and seeking the urgent deployment of UN peacekeepers there prior to a referendum on the disputed region’s future political status.
The Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) are leading the international activist community in their support for the people of Kashmir after India’s recent “Israeli”-like unilateral actions in the occupied territory, proverbially putting their money where their mouth is by not just verbally supporting them like they earlier declared but actually going as far as to file a complaint on their behalf at the UN. The organization’s legal advisor Gurpatwant Singh Pannun informed the world in a press release that the SFJ officially urged the global body “to deploy the UN Peacekeeping Force in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir to stop the genocidal violence against Muslims by the Indian security forces” and “to hold a plebiscite to determine the will of the people of Kashmir regarding the status of Indian-held Kashmir as already decided in UN resolutions on Kashmir.” He also drew important attention to the alliance between Kashmiri Muslims and pro-Khalistan Sikhs when declaring that they “have joined hands in liberating their respective homelands from Indian occupation through referenda”, after which he emphasized their common struggle for self-determination and pointed out how their people have the UN-enshrined right to peacefully determine their political futures.
The SFJ’s actions are immensely significant because they represent the most profound political support that the Kashmiris have received since India attempted to annex them last week. They also raise awareness of the Khalistani cause as well and can contribute to inspiring the international activist community to learn more about their struggle in order to understand why these two movements support one another. The Sikhs, just like the Kashmiris, have a long history of victimization by the Indian state, with the most dramatic example of this being the military’s attack against one of the holiest shrines of the world’s fifth-largest religion during the infamous “Operation Blue Star” in 1984 that also resulted in the destruction of the Sikh Reference Library that housed thousands of irreplaceable documents related to this faith. India’s subsequent “Operation Woodrose” saw the military hunting down the Sikhs of Punjab in the months after this unprecedented assault, after which they were killed en masse during the genocidal state-sponsored pogroms that took place all across the country following the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards later that year.
Indian Punjab in the 1990s was also remarkably similar to current-day Kashmir in that the military often engaged in arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial executions in its campaign to crush the Khalistan movement. Not only that, but the government has done so little to counter the drug scourge there and address Punjub’s crisis of farmer suicides that it begins to look like the state is waging Hybrid War on its own Sikh citizens in order to remove them from that region as part of its “final solution” for stopping this separatist threat. Not coincidentally, there are now very serious concerns that India is planning to carry out a more rapid ethnic cleansing against the Kashmiris too by unleashing countless “Weapons of Mass Migration” into the disputed territory after revoking a constitutional clause that had hitherto prohibited the purchase of land in the region by non-residents in order to retain its demographic balance. The Chief Minister of Haryana openly hinted as much when he said that non-Kashmiri men can now marry Kashmiri women, which was widely interpreted as a dog whistle encouraging the country’s innumerable rapists to abuse women from that occupied region.
The slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Sikhs from Indian Punjab was therefore a precedent for what might be about to happen at a much faster speed in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK), which further explains why the SFJ are so active in trying to stop the impending catastrophe there because their people can personally relate to it. In an effort to bring about accountability for what’s happening in that closed-off region, they’re also seeking European arrest warrants for Indian Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah ahead of their planned participation in this year’s G7 Summit later this month in France, as their legal advisor revealed in a joint press conference that he held with Lord Nazir Ahmed. Not only that, but the organization and its Kashmiri partners disclosed their joint plans to symbolically raise their movements’ flags all across the world in defiance of Indian Independence Day on 15 August, which will certainly generate substantial international media coverage and further their shared causes. Therefore, as it stands, the SFJ are doing more than anyone else to help the Kashmiris, and the rest of the international activist community can learn a lot from their example.
The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
